“You do not love me?” said Frank. “Well, I don’t wonder at it; you are so brilliant, so superior to me. I will abandon hope,—I will leave you, as you command me. But at least I will not part with my privilege to serve you. As for the rest, shame on me if I could be mean enough to boast of love, and enforce a suit, at such a moment.”
Frank turned his face and stole away softly. He did not arrest his steps at the drawing-room; he went into the parlour, wrote a brief line to Levy charging him quietly to dismiss the execution, and to come to Frank’s rooms with the necessary deeds; and, above all, to say nothing to the count. Then he went out of the house and walked back to his lodgings.
That evening Levy came to him, and accounts were gone into, and papers signed; and the next morning Madame di Negra was free from debt; and there was a great claim on the reversion of the Casino estates; and at the noon of that next day, Randal was closeted with Beatrice; and before the night came a note from Madame di Negra, hurried, blurred with tears, summoning Frank to Curzon Street. And when he entered the marchesa’s drawing-room, Peschiera was seated beside his sister; and rising at Frank’s entrance, said, “My dear brother-in-law!” and placed Frank’s hand in Beatrice’s.
“You accept—you accept me—and of your own free will and choice?”
And Beatrice answered, “Bear with me a little, and I will try to repay you with all my—all my—” She stopped short, and sobbed aloud.
“I never thought her capable of such acute feelings, such strong attachment,” whispered the count.
Frank heard, and his face was radiant. By degrees Madame di Negra recovered composure, and she listened with what her young lover deemed a tender interest, but what, in fact, was mournful and humbled resignation, to his joyous talk of the future. To him the hours passed by, brief and bright, like a flash of sunlight. And his dreams when he retired to rest were so golden! But when he awoke the next morning, he said to himself, “What—what will they say at the Hall?” At that same hour Beatrice, burying her face on her pillow, turned from the loathsome day, and could have prayed for death. At that same hour, Giulio Franzini, Count di Peschiera, dismissing some gaunt, haggard Italians, with whom he had been in close conference, sallied forth to reconnoitre the house that contained Violante. At that same hour, Baron Levy was seated before his desk, casting up a deadly array of figures, headed, “Account with the Right Hon. Audley Egerton, M. P., Dr. and Cr.”—title-deeds strewed around him, and Frank Hazeldean’s post-obit peeping out fresh from the elder parchments. At that same hour, Audley Egerton had just concluded a letter from the chairman of his committee in the city he represented, which letter informed him that he had not a chance of being re-elected. And the lines of his face were as composed is usual, and his foot rested as firm on the grim iron box; but his hand was pressed to his heart, and his eye was on the clock, and his voice muttered, “Dr. F—should be here!” And that hour Harley L’Estrange, who the previous night had charmed courtly crowds with his gay humour, was pacing to and fro the room in his hotel with restless strides and many a heavy sigh; and Leonard was standing by the fountain in his garden, and watching the wintry sunbeams that sparkled athwart the spray; and Violante was leaning on Helen’s shoulder, and trying archly, yet innocently, to lead Helen to talk of Leonard; and Helen was gazing steadfastly on the floor, and answering but by monosyllables; and Randal Leslie was walking down to his office for the last time, and reading, as he passed across the Green Park, a letter from home, from his sister; and then, suddenly crumpling the letter in his thin pale hand, he looked up, beheld in the distance the spires of the great national Abbey; and recalling the words of our hero Nelson, he muttered, “Victory and Westminster, but not the Abbey!” And Randal Leslie felt that, within the last few days, he had made a vast stride in his ambition,—his grasp on the old Leslie lands, Frank Hazeldean betrothed, and possibly disinherited; and Dick Avenel, in the background, opening against the hated Lansmere interest that same seat in parliament which had first welcomed into public life Randal’s ruined patron.
“But some must laugh, and some must weep;
Thus runs the world away!”